Projects

This project will study the Developing Leaders Transforming Practice (DLTP) intervention, which aims to develop teacher leaders, improve teachers' instructional practices, and increase student mathematics understanding and achievement.

This project will study the Developing Leaders Transforming Practice (DLTP) intervention, which aims to improve teachers' instructional practices, increase student mathematics understanding and achievement.

This project uses a new theoretical framework that specifies criteria for developing scientific thinking skills that include the value that people place on scientific aims, the cognitive engagement needed to evaluate scientific claims, and the scientific skills that will enable one to arrive at the best supported explanation of a scientific phenomenon. The project will work with high school biology teachers to investigate their own understanding of scientific thinking, how it can be improved through professional development, and how this improvement can translate into practice to support student learning.

The project will develop and research an innovative model for rural science teacher professional development via technology-mediated lesson study (TMLS). This approach supports translating professional learning into classroom practice by developing a technology-based, social support system among rural teachers.

The project will design, develop, and test a research-based professional development (PD) approach that will ensure that teachers, and ultimately their middle-school students, have the knowledge to act in a way that promotes zero net loss of biodiversity in their communities. Through their participation in the PD, teachers will be equipped to plan for and implement NGSS-aligned instruction, facilitate student identification and understanding of biodiversity and environmental justice issues in their local community, and foster student capacity to take action. Students will come to understand that biodiversity is a global issue that they can influence at the local level, and will become empowered, in both their knowledge and their agency, to be leaders in solving biodiversity problems in their communities.

This project builds on a successful introductory computer science curriculum, called Scratch Encore, to explore ways to support teachers in bringing together—or harmonizing—existing Scratch Encore instructional materials with themes that reflect the interests, cultures, and experiences of their students, schools, and communities. In designing these harmonized lessons, teachers create customized activities that resonate with their students while retaining the structure and content of the original Scratch Encore lesson.

The project focuses on the development of formative assessment tools that highlight assets of students’ use of crosscutting concepts (CCCs) while engaged in science and engineering practices in grades 9-12 Life Sciences.

Adopting a teaching and curricular approach that will be novel in its integration of custom explanatory storybook materials with hands-on investigations, this project seeks to promote third grade students' understanding of small- and large-scale evolution by natural selection. By studying students across multiple school districts, this research will shed light on the benefits to diverse students of instruction that focuses on supporting children's capacities to cogently explain aspects of the biological world rather than learn disparate facts about it.

This project aims to elaborate a structure for practice-oriented, collaborative professional development that increases the capacities for collaborative learning by facilitating teacher-to-teacher interactions within and across cultural contexts. By convening international groups of teachers to design lessons and provide and respond to commentaries on their lesson designs, the project introduces possibilities for surfacing and disrupting common experiences, assumptions, and norms in US mathematics teaching.

In this project, investigators from the University of North Dakota develop, evaluate, and implement an on-going, collaborative professional development program designed to support teachers in teaching engineering design to 5th-8th grade students in rural and Native American communities.

This project will explore PK-2 teachers' content knowledge by investigating their understanding of the design and implementation of culturally relevant computer science learning activities for young children. The project team will design a replicable model of PK-2 teacher professional development to address the lack of research in early computer science education.

This project will convene stakeholders in STEM and early childhood education to discuss better integration of STEM in the early grades. PIs will begin with a phase of background research to surface critical issues in teaching and learning in early childhood education and STEM.  A number of reports will be produced including commissioned papers, vision papers, and a forum synthesis report.

The project will create opportunities for teachers to develop programming content knowledge and new understandings of the creative possibilities in computer science education, thereby increasing opportunities for students to develop conceptual and creative fluency with programming.

The main goal of this project is to better understand how to build and sustain the capacity of elementary science teachers in grades 3-5 to instruct and formatively assess students in ways that are aligned with contemporary science education frameworks and standards. To achieve this goal, the project will use classroom-based science assessment as a focus around which to build teacher capacity in science instruction and three-dimensional learning in science.

This project explores the mechanisms by which teachers translate what they learn from professional development into their teaching practice. The goal of this project is to study how the knowledge and skills teachers acquire during professional development (PD) translate into more conceptually oriented mathematics teaching and, in turn, into increased student learning.

This study will investigate factors influencing teacher change after professional learning (PL) experiences and will examine the extent to which modest supports for science and engineering teaching in grades 3-5 sustain PL outcomes over the long term, such as increases in instructional time devoted to science, teacher self-efficacy in science, and teacher use of reform-oriented instructional strategies aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards.

This project will study the design and development of PD that supports teacher development and student learning, and provide accumulation of evidence to inform teacher educators, administrators, teachers, and policymakers of factors associated with successful PD experiences and variation across teachers and types of PDs. The study will examine teachers' uptake of mathematics content, pedagogy and materials from different types of professional development in order to understand and unpack the factors that are associated with what teachers take up and use two-three years beyond their original PD experience.

This project focuses on the teaching practice of building on student thinking, a practice in which teachers engage students in making sense of their peers' mathematical ideas in ways that help the whole class move forward in their mathematical understanding. The study examines how teachers incorporate this practice into mathematics discussions in secondary classrooms by designing tasks that generate opportunities for teachers to build on students' thinking and by studying teachers' orchestration of whole class discussions around student responses to these tasks.

This project seeks to strengthen the teaching of statistics and data science in grades 6-12 through the design and implementation of an online professional learning environment for teachers. The professional learning environment aims to support in-service teachers in developing stronger content knowledge related to statistics, and knowledge of how to effectively teach statistics in their classrooms.

This project aims to develop an innovative field-based science learning approach that will support the capacity of culturally diverse students in Grades K-3 to engage in complex ecological reasoning and related problem solving. To provide rich learning environments, outdoor learning gardens will be created in which students, teachers, garden educators, and families participate in activities that facilitate the investigation of tangible ecological challenges such as water capture and food security.

The purpose of this project is to test the efficacy of the Learning and Teaching with Learning Trajectories (LT2) program with the goal of improving mathematics teaching and thereby increasing young students' math learning. LT2 is a professional development tool and a curriculum resource intended for teachers to be used to support early math instruction and includes the mathematical learning goal, the developmental progression, and relevant instructional activities.

This project aims to support the mathematics learning of students with disabilities through the development and use of mixed reality simulations for elementary mathematics teacher preparation. These simulations represent low-stakes opportunities for preservice teachers to practice research-based instructional strategies to support mathematics learning, and to receive feedback on their practices.

The Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) Partnership Program responds to disparities in student access to high-quality, advanced physics instruction by bringing together Illinois high school physics teachers from a diverse set of school contexts to participate in intensive PD experiences structured around university-level instructional materials. This program will help teachers adapt, adopt, and integrate high-quality, university-aligned physics instruction into their classrooms, in turn opening more equitable, clear, and viable pathways for students into STEM education and careers. 

To support equitable access to place-based science learning opportunities, Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance in collaboration with BSCS Science Learning, will develop and test a model to support 3rd-5th grade teachers in incorporating locally or culturally relevant place-based phenomena into rigorously tested curricular units that meet the expectations of the NGSS. The project team will develop two units that could be used in any region across the country with built-in opportunities and embedded supports for teachers to purposefully adapt curriculum to include local phenomena. In-person and virtual professional learning experiences will further help teachers who have limited district support for science to incorporate place-based approaches. Participating teachers will range from rural and urban settings in California, Colorado, and Maine to ensure the end products of this project are relevant, scalable, appropriate for a wide range of students across the country.

This project will bring together two groups of educators - elementary school teachers (formal) and cooperative extension science volunteers (informal) - to create a community-based professional development partnership that improves educators' self-efficacy, science content knowledge, and instructional practice. The model builds on the premise that both groups have expertise that can be shared and collaboratively developed.